RE: NPR, Godel, Semantic Web

From: Danny Ayers <danny@panlanka.net>

To: Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com, xml-dev@lists.xml.org

Date: Wed, 09 May 2001 01:09:48 +0600

Title:

The bigger problem with the SW, as many
have noted, is that Gödel will never hava a chance to screw up the works,
because he only talks about the incompleteness of CONSISTENT sets of
axioms. Getting consistency in the SW's vast network of RDF metadata
will be a monumental problem, and ANYTHING can be proven in with an
inconsistent set of axioms (as my poor remaining neurons dimly recall my
higher education).So, at best the SW will have to employ some heuristics
for finding useful axioms to feed into a logical inference engine.
Whether this is worth the cost is another matter.

Yep, I think you've got it here - there won't be one
single set of axioms in one inference engine, so the analysis in these terms
falls flat. To get the kind of system doing things even vaguely like TimBL
talks of, there are going to have to be heuristics liberally scattered
throughout the system - after all, there are human nodes in there
too.

If I want to
book an appointment with an appropriate therapist at 9am in the
morning, I should be aware that there's at least a 1% chance of getting a
pizza at 10am instead

The sw will of course also provide new ways of
talking about what we saw on television (or heard on the radio) last night
;-)